A terminal located in a cell of a cellular communication network is usually served by the base station of the communication network which provides radio coverage for this cell. There are however scenarios when a terminal is served by more than one base station. For example, the terminal being located in a cell of the network and served by a first base station might be handed over in a so called soft handover to a second base station which provides radio coverage to the neighboring cell. During the soft handover, the terminal is served by the first and by the second base station simultaneously. Datagrams which are to be sent to the terminal are duplicated and sent by the first base station as well as by the second base station to the terminal during the soft handover. However, the datagrams sent via the first and second base station have to be synchronized as it must be guaranteed that both base stations send the identical datagrams in the identical order with identical link layer headers at the same time. It may also be required to synchronize the physical layer signals in order to increase capacity or reliability by using radio links to more than one base station. In order to, but not exclusively, organize the synchronization of the transmissions by the two base stations, the two base stations exchange signaling messages via the fixed network's infrastructure, e.g. via the backhaul network. The round trip time of a signaling message relates to the time it takes to transfer a signaling message from the first base station to the second base station and to receive a response at the first base station might however be quite long as the two base stations might be far apart with respect to the fixed network's topology. A long round trip time for the exchange of signaling messages might lead to delays in the simultaneous delivery of the datagrams to the mobile terminal and might therefore negatively affect time critical applications running on the mobile terminal that make use of the datagrams.
There is therefore a need for an improved method of transmitting signaling messages in a communication network. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved base station and terminal for realizing the method proposed herein.